


three tries

by lester_sheehan



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-19 23:02:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11323542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lester_sheehan/pseuds/lester_sheehan
Summary: Set immediately after 10x11.





	three tries

She wasn’t sure she had ever seen him so terrified—not this face, anyway. Not in this time. His brow was drawn tight into a frown, his eyes broken and red and swimming and— _oh_ …  so full of pain that she felt her hearts falter, just for a moment. She widened her grin, wicked and sharp, dangerous as a razor’s edge. “Oh Doctor, you do look rather surprised. Shall I introduce myself?”

Beside her, the Master chuckled, the tip of his tongue held between his teeth. His eyes moved from Missy to the Doctor with a kind of eagerness that bordered on predatory. He didn’t speak; he didn’t need to. For now, she was on her own.

“Missy.” The word ripped from the Doctor’s throat, gravelly and raw and sounding all wrong. Her smile dropped just a little. “What is this? What—what have you _done_?”

She didn’t respond, instead choosing to take a step towards him—her eyes rolled at the way he stepped back almost instinctively—until she was close enough to see every multitude of colour within his hair, each individual streak.

“Oh, I have been such a fool. You know, you convinced me. You had me wrapped around your little finger this entire time. I honestly thought that you were _trying_. That we could be—” his voice faltered, cracking beneath the weight of the word, “friends.”

“Then that is your fault, Doctor, not mine!” she snapped, drawing back from him, slinking into the shadows. He couldn’t see her eyes as she said, “How could I—how could _you_ —ever have expected me to change?”

His sorrow began to resonate, shifting like magma into something more tangible, into a burning, simmering rage. “How long?” he said, accent thick. “How long have you been planning this?” A trembling finger shot out in her direction. “I never asked how you ended up there, kneeling before your executioner. I never sought to find it out. I gave you that courtesy. I longed, I foolishly hoped, that this time could be different. All those tears you shed.” He shook his head, hands balled into fists at his side.

She remained silent, and when he looked at her again, he saw nothing but hot, blinding red. “How long?” he repeated.

“Now, now, Doctor,” the Master said, “let’s not be pushy.” He rolled up his sleeve and stared at his own watch-less wrist. “By my calculations, I’d say about ten minutes.”

The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. “What?” he said. He did not think he could manage much else.

“Ten minutes. Six hundred seconds. The time it took for me to explain—accurately—why you would never forgive her. Why she’d be better off coming back before it all went to hell.” His eyes shifted to Bill. “Guess it’s a little too late for that.”

“You didn’t know?” the Doctor said, directing his question towards Missy now. “He’s _you_ , how could you not know?”

Light, taunting: “I don’t remember,” Missy said, drawing out the words as though they meant nothing. “But, tell me, is he wrong?”

“Wrong?”

“Could you ever have forgiven me, knowing what I’d done?” The smirk had not yet fallen from her face. The mask was yet to slip.

The Doctor sighed, forlorn and weary and desperate for it all to end. “Have I not forgiven worse?” he said, allowing his eyes to close. “Have I not always, recklessly, against all moral judgement, forgiven worse?”

She felt her hearts falter once more, and the longer that she stared at him, at the lines on his face and the exhaustion in his limbs, the more she realised that, as always, she had made a grave mistake. So convinced she had been of her own damnation that she had failed to see what she had always missed. So terrified she had been of his rejection that she had chosen to let him go.  

“I—” For once, she had no words to match his, no smart remark to set everyone on edge. Glancing briefly towards the Master, who seemed so horribly pleased with himself that Missy’s stomach felt like lead, her chest aching as though she had swallowed the entire earth, she left the room.

And as soon as she was alone, she felt herself snap. Her mind was reeling, spinning, screaming; her brain was full of smoke and mist and haze. She couldn’t see past the blackness that filled her vision, the heaviness that seemed to hang from every inch of her.

Barely aware of what she was doing, her hands reached for anything to hold before smashing it to the ground, watching as the glass shattered and the machinery rolled across the metal floor. Shards latched onto her skin, tearing into the palm of her hand. She didn’t notice the blood.

Before long she was outside, breathing in the polluted, poisoned, death-covered air, having left a trail of chaos and splintered windows in her wake. But even then, her mind did not clear, did not even begin to reason. She couldn’t _think_ , couldn’t _focus._ All that she could hear was the sound of the Doctor’s voice: the desperation, the sadness of a man who had lost once again; all that she could see was his sorrow, as though it were a living entity, enveloping him in its long, choking arms.

She cursed him and his love of breakable, fragile things. She cursed herself and her love of the same.

She cursed the entire senseless universe and its whims and wishes and— Why now? Why _him_? Why this? 

Resting her back against a nearby tree, she lowered herself to the ground, skirts billowing around her. And then, when she was sure that no one was around, she put her face into her arms and began to weep.

***

She could bear the broken look on his face just as much as she could bear the irritating _thing_ that he travelled with—that is to say, she would rather burn the entire planet than stare at it for a second longer.

And so instead of facing him, explaining herself, begging him to take her back like one of his pets who had let him down, she continued in her fury, her never-ending, thoroughly inconsistent, blaze of emotions. She had never been one to control them well, never one to know when to stop, concede, _yield_.

When the Doctor next approached, she made sure that she wasn’t alone. With the Master by her side, she taunted him endlessly, grinned at his confusion. Gazed out at the city of cybermen and revelled in the excitement, the annihilation, of it all.

She danced with herself under the falling sky, flames like candles in her eyes.

But then he grabbed her hand, pulled her away from the temptation, the only viable option she could see. She stumbled over the rocky grass and all but fell into his grip, mouth agape. “Stand with me,” he said, searching her eyes. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

The menace was gone from her face, replaced instead with a softer astonishment. The light from the burning city cast shadows across her features, and, rather than a simple blue, her eyes were now golden and water-like and crystallised. She looked down to where their hands met, at the way the Doctor seemed unwilling to let her go. “I can’t,” she said.

“Missy, _please_.” After all this—after every mistake, every snarled insult that would have made any other man wish for nothing more than to see her gone—he was still trying. His thumb ran along the inside of her palm, his gaze shooting downwards. “You’re bleeding,” he said, more of a question than a statement, and she yanked her hand away.

He had no time to press the issue. “Did no one tell you that it’s rather uncouth to beg, Doctor?” the Master said, that wicked grin never once leaving his face.

The Doctor sighed, licked the dryness from his lips. “The offer extends to you, too.”

The Master hesitated—for one singular, almost imperceptible, moment—but then his mouth twisted, forming the word slowly, drawing it out from within: “Never.”

The Doctor did not argue the point, and neither of them noticed until it was too late that Missy had slipped away once more.

***

He broke her on the third attempt.

They were alone, the sky a morbid concoction of blues and greys and blacks. The air was cold, and the wind brushed against their faces like ice.

She’d dropped the façade, given up the pretence. Standing out in the open, with the heavy silence pressing down on them from all sides, she looked small—harmless, almost—and the Doctor was quickly running out of options. With little hope, feeling as though he was stuck in an endless cycle of folly, he tried one final time.

“Stand with me.”

She breathed in, closed her eyes for just a moment. She had wanted this—his acceptance, his friendship, his trust—for so long, and now the moment had come but it was far from a victory. Why, she wondered, did she still feel so sad?

The buzzing in her mind continued, a flurry of thoughts, so contrasting amongst themselves that she felt as though they did not quite belong to her alone. Friends, enemies, good, bad—could she even tell the difference anymore?

Had she ever been able to?

Her eyes opened, tears held viciously back, and as she placed her hand within the Doctor’s own, she didn’t say a word.


End file.
